Leon Turnbull Photography

So this year, once again, REI has stolen my idea to go out and hike on Black Friday, instead of shopping. Opt Outside they call it, this original unique idea of theirs. Not! I have been doing this for many many years now, long before REI thought of it. Black Friday has always been my favorite day of the year to hike. Oh yeah, you say, cry me a river. Well all right, fine, I know that I did not invent the idea of hiking on Black Friday, and I am sure others have done it before me. But REI sure didn’t invent it either, and they are the ones getting all the credit and publicity. When I started hiking on Black Fridays, no one else was out on the trails. Everyone was shopping (or sleeping). That was the thing to do. Not so much anymore. I suppose that’s a good thing.

Actually, I have started something new in the last few years. That is, hike on Thanksgiving Thursday in addition to Black Friday. I can go out for a morning hike on Thursday, and be home in time for the family festivities in the afternoon, then I get the whole day on Friday. My wife lets me do this, amazingly. She is a good wife. I do give her Saturday for her thing. Shopping or whatever. I am nice that way. ha ha.

Okay so anyhow, my choice for Thursday morning was Big Mosquito Falls. I have been here before, more than once. I went right to the bottom this time, but I could not find a good viewpoint from down there, as it is very steep and cliffy at the bottom and the top of the falls is blocked by trees. I did not want to spend much time trying to find one either because I wanted to explore further downstream.

So down the mountain I went. And down. And down. It is quite steep, the descent. The ground was covered with fallen leaves. Very slippery leaves. Slick as ice, leaves. It is a good thing I know how to ski, because essentially that is what I was doing. Skiing down the steep mountain in my hiking boots. No joke. Thankfully, it was not cliffy. Otherwise … you get the picture.

I came to the top of a ridge beside the creek. I could see a waterfall far below me at the bottom, and it looked like a good one too. It is not exactly where I expected a waterfall to be, but this works for me. Even better, there was a path down to the bottom. This was very surprising. Who would have ever thought to come here before? The only thing around way down here are bears. It was very steep but not cliffy (and no slippery leaves), and I made it all the way down to find this gorgeous 42 ft. high piece of magnificence. Very awesome.

I spent quite a bit of time down at this waterfall, taking my sweet old time, searching out different compositions. It seemed to me that the best one involved me standing in the middle of the creek. It’s been awhile since I have done this, standing in the middle of a freezing cold creek to take a photo, but hey, it seemed the right thing to do. Am I right?